Milo Manara: “I won’t sue Musk but I raise the copyright issue”

Musk has invaded your world, at this point you invade yours: if you – as you said in a post – really sued him asking him 44 billion dollars in compensation, buying back Twitter, how would this social network want it? Milo Manara does not shy away from the game. He laughs. And the day after Musk’s “theft” of a drawing of him to make a controversial tweet about Trump, he tells us about his vision.

“I – he explains – am a troglodyte of social media, I rarely visit them, I don’t even have Twitter. I move badly in that world there, but my position in the Facebook post, while being ironic, was meant to pose a serious problem.

Or?
“On the one hand I was tempted to let it go, but it didn’t seem very right out of respect for my profession and for all those who do it. I found this half-joking formula to denounce the use of someone else’s drawings without permission. I’m not saying paying the rights – even if it would be right – but at least asking for permission. Then in this case there is a mixture of politics and lots of money. A tour from which I gladly stay away. I would like to be left alone.”

Will he sue?
“We are talking to lawyers. Musk found this image on the internet. But I didn’t publish them: in the end my drawings seem to go on the net by themselves… In any case, he took over a post from another. A complicated story. It really won’t be easy to sue.”

She wrote in a post replying to Musk “I wish Elon Musk was forced to tweet a thousand times: I will never again use Milo Manara’s drawings without permission”. But after a day maybe he changed his mind? You were already famous, but now… That tweet after less than 24 hours already has a million likes and will have made billions of views.
“As I said, I was tempted to say ‘I pretend nothing happened’, it’s all advertising. But then I thought about it. And I said to myself it’s not right, behind this there is the wild pirate use of images on the net. Of course, I could not imagine my reaction could unleash this hell. But, on the other hand, if the richest man in the world and a former president of the United States are involved in this controversy, it is logical that everything goes viral”.

What else bothered her?
“Well, the first reaction was amazement. One does not imagine that Musk goes to sift through my drawings on the internet. Then he bothered me about being involved in a controversy (Trump’s return to Twitter, ed) between two people far from my way of being. From my concept of life, of work. And then this arrogance, this arrogance. This is also the second time Musk has used my drawing for a Twitter post. Last time he used my illustration for a bitcoin controversy”.

So it’s official, Elon Musk reads Milo Manara.
“Ah ah I don’t think so, they are illustrations of erotic short stories written in rhyme by Jean de La Fontaine that we know above all for the animal tales. They are books that have not been published in the USA. At least I think so…”.

Exactly… How was that drawing originally born? What was the point?
“It was the illustration of a rhyming text that spoke of a friar who tricks beautiful girls with the excuse of confession. Which are consenting. He invites them to meditation, to confession, but they have to do it in a particular, somewhat mouthy way. All told in stately, seventeenth-century language. If you take that drawing out of context, you no longer understand anything”.

Originally the design was not vulgar, now it is unquestionably so. Does this mean?
“Yes, not only that: it is clear that Musk violates the same rules as Twitter on pornography. This is also what bothered me. Let me explain. Whether you take the drawing as it was made is one thing. But if you extrapolate it and show a beautiful girl with her bottom sticking out and one against the light that you don’t quite know who she is, you decontextualize it, you ruin it, you make it into pornography. This is why I exclude that Musk is my reader. A reader of mine would never have done such a thing.”

Now what is he working on?
“These days I’m running out of boards for The Name of The rose in comics, it should come out at the same time as the Turin book fair and the one in Paris in the spring. A very demanding job. But it was offered to me by Eco’s sons, it was a very difficult offer to refuse”.

Can you explain this boundary between art and pornography, between a beautiful drawing and a vulgar one?
“It has always been a blurred line. It has never been clear. The beauty is staying on the wire. But the network and social networks have confused everything. With a simple image it is not easy to draw this boundary. You need a story.

Eroticism is the cultural elaboration of sex. Instead, pornography is an exhibition of sex, now – indeed – an exhibition of athletic performances. Which rarely, despite the commitment of actors – and, I would say, of actresses above all… – fail to ignite the spark of eroticism. I don’t follow pornography much – even if I don’t find anything wrong with it – but by now it’s moving towards the ‘strange famolo’, towards extreme things. For eroticism it is another matter. Since it is a cultural elaboration, it is instead a very rich world, full of nuances. And it is a world that will always have its own interest and that evolves with the evolution of society, with the concepts of modesty changing over time”.

We translate everything and send to Musk, maybe he will learn something.
“Okay – concludes Manara laughing – so we can also do justice for poor Lafontaine”.